News

On 24 May 2023, finance professionals from several CENTR member registries gathered in Brussels for their first face-to-face meeting since the CENTR Finance Group was established in 2022. The goal of the group is to allow its participants to benchmark financial data by way of standardised definitions of financial cost areas typical to a domain name registry.

In a nutshell: The European institutions have concluded their trilogue negotiations on the GI protection of crafts and industrial products, while the Swedish Council presidency has put forward amendments to the sister proposal on the GI protection for agricultural products. The European Commission published a proposal for a regulation on standard essential patents, and released its recommendation on combatting online piracy. Commissioner Reynders outlined upcoming plans for the revision of the Consumer Protection Cooperation Regulation. Commissioner Breton introduced the European Cyber Shield. The Commission proposed a new Cyber Solidarity Act and a targeted amendment to the Cyber Security Act. In data protection, the EDPS has submitted input on the Commission’s GDPR review, and the EDPB adopted guidelines on data subjects’ right to access. The draft Insolvency Directive attracted submissions from the European Economic and Social Committee and the Parliament of the Czech Republic. The European Parliament’s LIBE Committee has published its draft report on proposed legislation to combat child sexual abuse online.

The CENTRstats Global TLD Report Edition 4/2022 has been published. It covers the global status and registration trends in all top-level domains (legacy gTLDs, new gTLDs and ccTLDs), with a specific focus on the European ccTLD market.

CENTR, the association which represents European country code top-level domain name registries (ccTLDs), such as .de for Germany or .no for Norway, has provided feedback to the United Nations' initiative on a Global Digital Compact (GDC).

The 116th IETF meeting took place in Yokohama between 25 and 31 March 2023 with more than 153 working group sessions, a 2-day hackathon, a wide range of side events and considerable emphasis on '(post) quantum' issues. Marco Davids and Caspar Schutijser from SIDN Labs attended the meeting and have written a summary of the main points of relevance for CENTR members.

CENTR is the association of European country code top-level domain name registries, and is looking for an experienced and enthusiastic individual to join our team temporarily as a Communications Manager (maternity cover). As part of our team, you will be responsible for implementing CENTR’s communications strategy and ensuring that our members and stakeholders are informed about the latest developments in the domain name system (DNS) industry. We can offer a consultancy contract or an equivalent short-term Belgian employment contract.

In a nutshell: The European Council adopted its conclusions, committing to strengthening work on digital solutions, such as eIDs. The EU institutions started trilogue negotiations on the GI protection for crafts/industrial products proposal. The Swedish presidency published its suggested amendments to the proposal for a regulation on GI protection for agricultural products, while the European Committee of the Regions issued its Opinion. The European Commission shared the Consumer Scoreboard. The EDPB circulated guidelines on certification as a tool for transfers and initiated a coordinated enforcement action. The European Parliament assigned the leadership of negotiations on the Cyber Resilience Act to ITRE. ENISA published a report on AI cybersecurity.

As the saying goes, every challenge presents an opportunity. At the 2023 CENTR Annual General Meeting, the Chair of the CENTR Board of Directors, Barbara Povše, took this to heart and instead of dwelling on the challenges faced in 2022, highlighted the achievements and successes of the CENTR community in the past year.

Despite long-standing data protection compliance discussions by the ICANN community since the advent of the GDPR, and the finalisation of the NIS 2 Directive that was a direct EU response to deal with the “unintended” consequences of the GDPR on the WHOIS, there is still no end in sight to the debate over how to reconcile the multistakeholder model with legislative obligations put forward across national jurisdictions. The GDPR’s implementation is still a work in progress, while the NIS 2 accuracy obligations applicable to all registries operating in the EU are still considered to be too abstract to be able to have an impact on ICANN policy development. One is clear: TLD registries must respect national and regional legislation, irrespective of what is happening at ICANN. 

During ICANN76, even remote attendees could feel the winds of change blowing through the organisation. In her opening speech, ICANN Chair Tripti Sinha emphasised that ICANN has reached an inflection point and will need constructive collaboration to make progress on longstanding issues. With WSIS+20 approaching, there is little time left to prove that the multistakeholder model can deliver on the promises made in 2005. These include in particular references to cybersecurity coordination (#40) and the fight against spam (#41) of the Internet Governance chapter of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society.